The sharing scene for the music I listen to mainly transitioned from P2P networks or Bittorrent sites to indexes of Megaupload/Rapidshare/whatever uploads. The advantages cited were the inability to track IPs and more dependability since one didn't have to wait around for seeders. These recent developments might be enough to send people back to Bittorrent, especially as legal challenges have not sufficed to bring down The Pirate Bay, let alone some of the (IMHO more useful) lesser known torrent communities.

If things go back to Bittorrent, remember that the community depends to a degree on you, so please seed.

This sort of comment is part of the problem, not the solution. Breaking the law simply because one isn't going go through the effort to pay for something optional like music is not helpful. It isn't noble. And it is exactly the sort of thing that makes nasty things like SOPA and the like get momentum. And as a result now, websites like Filesonic, which has perfectly legal and legitimate uses are now running into trouble. By all means, help those of us who care about civil liberties fight against draconian laws that would damage the Internet, and by all means join us in our attempts to make copyright laws marginally sane. But don't think that you are doing anything helpful when you make posts like the above.

If this type of service was only meant for personal backups and not illegal file sharing, this would have been the standard in the first place.

This is nonsense. "Personal backups" are by no means the only legitimate use of services such as this. As a freelance developer, I've had several clients use services like this to send me files. Is your imagination really so limited that you can't think of a single reason why you might want to share a file you have the rights to with another person?

File sharing is not intrinsically illegal. File sharing is fundamental to the Internet. Right now, Slashdot is sharing many, many files with people accessing it, including you. Are you a criminal? Copyright infringement is a particular type of file sharing. The two concepts are not synonymous, they are quite distinct.

And where exactly is it going to end? Files can be "shared" via github, savannah, and sourceforge too. In fact, that's the primary purpose of those sites - legal sharing of files containing open source code. Setting up an account on those sites to share things the user doesn't own is just as easy and could go unnoticed for quite a while before some RIAA/MPAA/etc lawyer decides to nuke an open source hub off the net for the actions of a handful of users. First they came for megaupload...

Some curiosity:In Bulgaria and also most other eastern European countries there used to be a funny practice amongst ISP's:Each internet provider used to have a NAS/LAN server, accessible only to subscribers/customers, loaded with warez, pr0n and movies, in a catalog type of way, year by year.

Same in Romania. We also already enjoyed fiber to the door years ago. Whatever film you wanted to watch some evening, you could download it in just a couple of minutes. It was this experience especially that really made me feel that the US had lost its edge in tech. Before emigrating to Eastern Europe, I was living in a major US metropolitan area but stuck with bad cable or DSL options that throttled the hell out of connections, as well as the fear of P2P lawsuits.

Github's public repositories can of course be used for illegal file sharing, and some infringing material probably exists right now, because it is impractical for the site operator to monitor all uploaded data. However, without such functionality, participating in (or even just forking) an open source project will be much more cumbersome.

Well, an hour spent writing open-source (or other) software is an hour not consuming MAFIAA's stuff, so maybe this is what they actually want...

It's not a slashdot opinion - it's the idea that you can take something from someone else who spent some money producing it for sale, and instead get it for free. And then claiming it's somehow your right, or somehow noble to do it.

Seeding is becoming incredibly dangerous in countries where the US has too much influence - take a look, for example, at New Zealand's Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2008. A law pretty much written by the US Government (read MPAA and RIAA) which essentially makes it so that once the relevant sections kick in, Warner Music or Disney can get you banned from the internet for six months because they claim to have detected you uploading files over Bittorrent - and the burden of proof is on you, the defendant, not them the accuser. And we both know that the reason the US government pushes laws like this overseas is so that they can weaken the domestic opposition. So while you say "please seed", some people are simply not in a position to.

For a law to be fair and just, it has to be accepted by a significant share of the population, i.e. it has to be democratically supported. When laws are simply forced from the top down by a few stake holders and then massively enforced against the population like in pre-democratic feudal middle ages, breaking a unjust law you can not democratically change is a fucking rebellion. A law does not automatically gain legitimacy just by being a "law", otherwise nobody would ever rebelled against feudalism. Feudalism also had "laws". Libya also had "laws" and you know how it ended. A law just being called a law means nothing.

A law gains legitimacy by the process how it is passed. It gains legitimacy by whether it is widely accepted as law. This crazy IP shit is neither. It was decided behind closed doors, by a few greedy sick fucks, and is then applied to millions with the sole intent to extract money from them and everybody knows this. Copyright in its todays form is as undemocratic and illegitimate as a law can get.

> help those of us who care about civil liberties fight against draconian laws

Come on, you fucking dont do anything. You dont attempt anything, you never ever accomplished anything. You know that you have no chance in hell to change this, so whats your plan? How are you gonna get big money out of and democracy into copyright legislation? How exactly do you "fight"?

> join us in our attempts to make copyright laws marginally sane

All you seemingly do is going around telling people not to break "the law", so basically youre part of the problem. You sound like big content, "dont break it, its the law, breaking it will make things worse for you". How is simply bowing down, obeying and not breaking an exploitive, undemocratic and unjust law going to automatically make the law more sane?

This sort of comment is part of the problem, not the solution. Breaking the law simply because one isn't going go through the effort to pay for something optional like music is not helpful. It isn't noble.

When you have a political system as unbelievably corrupt as the one in Washington D.C. right now, which passes laws for the copyright cartel to extend copyright indefinitely, I have to say that I think civil disobedience against copyright law is justified. The average citizen has NO power to do a damn thing about the law, and nowhere near enough money to buy their politicians back (not that that's how it should work).

It's all very well saying you should reform copyright the legal way, but be realistic: when is that going to happen? Is that ever going to happen? In the meantime, why should people put up with a law that the majority would disagree with if they really knew much about it and which we think is utterly unjustifiable, and a complete perversion of copyright's original intention?

There are 2 ways to stop MAFIAA/RIAA:
1. Everyone stops pirating - they stop bribing politicians because there is no longer a need.
2. Everyone pirates - they lose all of their revenue and eventually die.

If people can't download films and music on the internet anymore, they aren't going to go to their local HMV or whatever and pay Â£14 for a CD, then some will just get copies from their friends, but others will just go down the local market and pay Â£3 to a dodgy dealer like people used to before the internet. This genuinely, directly puts money into the hands of organised crime- some of which is tied back to terrorism (both Taliban/al Qaeda sympathisers, and the Tamil Tigers got a lot of funding doing this sort of thing in the UK and other Western countries), rather than the bunk claims that file sharing somehow profits organised crime.

[Tim O'Reilly] points out that he and a lot of other content creators have been happily coexisting with piracy all this time, and I’m certainly one of them. Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan. The big content companies are TERRIBLE at doing both of these things, so it’s no wonder they’re not doing so well in the current environment. And right now everyone’s fighting to control distribution channels, which is why I can’t watch Star Wars on Netflix or iTunes. It’s fine if you want to have that fight, but don’t yell and scream about how you’re losing business to piracy when your stuff isn’t even available in the box I have on top of my TV. A lot of us have figured out how to do this.

From the other side of the world, it is appalling how copyright law likes to screw everything over the entire globe.

Here in Australia, there is only one main source of multimedia online - iTunes. And it has a limited selection compared to the US version, and massive markups. What costs you guys 99c-$1.69 costs us $1.69-$2.19 (AUD and USD are practically at parity)Amazon doesn't work outside the US.Google Music doesn't work outside the US.Zune only started in Australia recently - but there are DRM restrictions.

Also, with TV episodes, there is a large delay between US availability and AU availability. At least months difference, and it is still overpriced and DRM locked on iTunes. We can't access iTunes US without a credit card. We aren't allowed to pay for it basically. So what is the easier option? Just download it.

Another common example among friends of mine:We all love k-pop. But we can't get Korean music in Australian music stores. We can't buy it online from iTunes. We can't set up an account for iTunes Korea. We can't order the CDs online either. So what is the obvious solution? Download it.

As long as the Music/TV/Movie industry make it extremely difficult to pay, there will be a large amount of people who pirate around the world because they aren't given the option to pay for it easily. However if paying for music was easier than downloading, there would be more people paying for music.

That's not actually true. Terrorists, like most other large groups (and we all know which large group produces terrorists), are on average morons.

The reasons weak spots get hit is not the intelligence of terrorists, but rather the number of attempts. And most obvious weak spots, like say the US electricity grid, have proven near 100% impervious for a decade now.

Once what you say becomes true, and you can generally expect any weak spot to be exploited then the tactical situation changes. It will change in the same manner as it is changing already. If weak spots get constantly attacked, we can't go after individual terrorists any more, but we must make sure they're caught before the attempts. There is no choice here. And yes that means arresting or isolating people whose only crime is suspicion of having certain ideas.

Copyright is a thing of the past. Information is freely shared by everyone. There is nothing that set a movie or a song apart in this regard.

As far as piracy is concerned, there is nothing anyone can do to stop it, short of shutting the internet down. If people have access to the internet, they will be able to communicate with everyone else that is on the internet. That's the definition of the internet.

People will also go undetected. That's the definition of encryption. You just set the key size to whatever suit your needs, and nobody will ever be able to decrypt it - unless they have the key.

Make encryption illegal and you kill e-commerce right there. Still make encryption illegal? Encryption can hide itself very easily: watermarking, hidden volumes, etc.

Nah. As long as people will be able to communicate, they will be able to pirate. Internet empowers everyone with almost unlimited (as far as songs and movies are concerned) communication. That comes with unlimited piracy. Sorry to disappoint you, but that's what the internet comes with.

1. Everyone stops pirating, they keep trying to expand copyright protection for other reasons. For one, I imagine that they would absolutly love it if they could get rid of the first sale doctrine and close down all those second-hand CD and DVD sales that undercut their own prices. The shift to digital distribution is the perfect chance for that - if you buy a 'licence' rather than a physical product, you have no right to sell it on to someone else. Lobbying for term extensions would also continue, as many influencial copyright holders have very valuable and old works. Micky Mouse is the most famous, but over in Europe music labels were the big lobbiers to protect their ownership of the Beatles and many of the influencial rock-and-roll bands. Then there is the issue of grey market imports - plenty of distributors would like to turn that grey market black

I'd rather option 2. I'm quite willing to sacrifice the big-budget movie if that is what it takes to defend free speech and access to unrestricted computing technology.

For invading our basic human rights, for heinous acts of financial and criminal terrorism, for treasonous corruption of the government, for hate crimes against individuals and humanity at large, the Big Media corporations must all be destroyed. There is no truce. They are one of the enemies who's goals are absolutely exclusive with a free humanity.

Destroy them. They have been in the process of destroying you since before you were born.

The people behind them should be incarcerated for life. Their financial assets should be seized and used to service the national debt if not outright destroyed. What happens to these enemies of mankind should strike fear in the pockets of all the rest. An example should be made so that none dare to attempt such enslavement of humanity ever again.

Artists no more deserve a grant of monopoly status than Microsoft or Google deserve a monopoly over OSes or search engines. Monopolies stifle culture, the free market, and customer choice.

If they want to make a living, let them collect an annual salary like I do for the creative works I produce. Get the money upfront, rather than rely upon Hollywood accounting to claim "it made no profit" to screw you.